Wednesday, 3 October 2012

#LTEAsia 2012 Highlights - via Alan Quayle

TD-LTE is gaining momentum, and its beyond WiMAX operators and China mobile, many APAC operators are considering it for unpaired spectrum and to efficiently meet the asymmetric capacity requirements of mobile broadband which is mainly download

Software defined radio and self-organizing networks are proving critical to manage operational costs

Single RAN is proving the best way to manage network performance

Signaling is in a mess - what is the good of standards when it creates such a mess?

IMS gaps continue - what is the good of standards when it doesn't meet basic migration needs?

The SS7 guys have reinvented themselves as the Diameter guys

Business model innovation - LTE is not just for mobile devices, LTE is for quad play and an interesting array of business applications

The 3G network of many operators is congested - forcing the move to LTE

CSFB (Circuit Switched Fall Back) works

VoLTE testing / roaming / network issues remain - given voice remains by revenue the core service, our industry should be ashamed we're having so many problems with VoLTE

A belief on OTT partnering, but not quantification on the OTT's willingness to pay for QoS (Quality of Service)

Many operators have a question mark on the use of WiFi off-load - its not a technology issue rather one of economics and customer experience, LTE-A and small cells in hotspots appears to be the focus.

Briefly reviewing the slides shown below:

LTE Data Points

96 Commercial LTE deployments mainly in the 1.8 and 2.8GHz bands

APAC has 40% of LTE subscribers, likely to be the high growth region

Drivers for LTE: Throughput, efficiency and low latency

TD-LTE: 12 commercial deployments, 24 contracts and 53 Trials

Streaming video dominates traffic on handheld devices, with YouTube being the top traffic generator at 27% of peak traffic

South Korea Data Explosion

South Korea has seen OTT explode, Kakao Talk 51 mins of usage per day

20 times smartphone growth in 2 years (28M in June 2012, 53% penetration)

60 times mobile data growth to 37TB per month in 2 years, 32% is from LTE devices

LTE subs use 2.9GB per month compared to 3G sub on average use 1.2GB

LTE subs reached 10M, 141% monthly growth

Customer drive for LTE is speed (37%) and latest device (31%)

Challenge Jan 2010 and Jan 2012 ARPU fallen from $48-$35 while data use risen from 180MB to 992MB